


Maybe.

by spasmodicIntrigue



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Meteorstuck, Retcon Timeline, Stream of Consciousness, mostly angst, musings about life and death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 09:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8527099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spasmodicIntrigue/pseuds/spasmodicIntrigue
Summary: You’ve been lying on your bed staring at the distant ceiling for the past twenty minutes. It’s getting worse, this feeling. Emptiness—but not emptiness.

Dave's bored. Maybe. Maybe it's something else.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I literally just wrote this like two hours ago and I'm posting it right away because I'm quite certain if I leave it until tomorrow I'll hate it and not want to post it. But I want to post it, so I'm just fuckin' doin' it. The ideas here have been bouncing around in my head for over a week and it's kinda nice to finally expunge them.
> 
> Also I'm employing Jack Kerouac's notion of "first thought, best thought," meaning this hasn't been edited. _At all._ It goes a little against my principles for writing but I'm not going to get into a discourse about literary form here.

There’s nothing to do.

Okay, that’s a lie, there’s plenty to do—there’s always plenty to do. Here would be the appropriate moment for some quote you vaguely recall about being idle. You’re pretty sure the gist of it is that it’s your own fucking fault if you get bored.

So let’s rephrase:

There’s nothing you want to do. There’s nothing you can do that removes that feeling of there being nothing to do.

Sleep? Not tired.

Eat? Not hungry.

Drink? That depends. Drink what? Whatever Rose has cooked up? Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s secretly the cure for this feeling of… you don’t know what to call it. Emptiness, you guess, but that’s not quite right. Maybe that’s why Rose does it. You’ve criticised her for it but now you almost emphasise. Except you don’t have the energy to emphasise. But your energy isn’t low enough for sleep.

Write? Fuck that. As if you need to be bouncing your own thoughts off a page and onto your retinas, back into your neural system, to zap around a few more times until you hate them; hate the way you worded them, all contrived rhyming patterns and trying-too-hard vocabulary.

You could watch something, but you feel too fidgety and agitated to actually sit down and pay attention.

You could read something, but it’s essentially the same problem. You already tried that, anyway. While it’s easy enough to just sort of zone out and take in the words on the page (words that aren’t your own—it’s refreshing but also makes you feel alone, in a strange way, and guilty in an even stranger one) but it doesn’t entertain you. That boredom is still there, like a knot in your chest cavity, as if even your _heart_ has gotten fed up with your shit and curled in on itself as tight as it can go. It’s not comfortable.

You’ve been lying on your bed staring at the distant ceiling for the past twenty minutes. It’s getting worse, this feeling. Emptiness—but not emptiness, because if it were emptiness, you wouldn’t have that knot in your chest. Except your chest does kind of feel empty… empty and not empty at the same time. As if your chest cavity really is just a black hole and that knot you feel is the pressure of that black hole consuming you from inside out.

That would make sense. Maybe.

But if it were emptiness, your head wouldn’t feel so crowded, so filled with thoughts of _why?_ and _what can I do?_ and _how much longer?_ in addition to the usual foul shit that’s been stinking up your cranium ever since this fucking meteor blasted off into fuck knows where—and you don’t even want to _address_ that bullshit right now, so you’ve got it firmly shoved into a metaphorical chest of drawers more cramped and crowded than that of a spoiled teenager with too many fucking clothes to have space for. That’s how you feel—there’s too much shit in your head and not enough space for it.

Still though, it _is_ empty, in a way. Just like your chest. There’s no black hole, though; it’s just empty in the sense that there’s so much that there’s literally no method, anymore, of prioritising, so it all just floats in the mental ether that is your severely fucked up mind.

You think that maybe that contradictory empty/full feeling in your head is why everything outside of your head feels…

 

Well. You don’t even know how to describe how it feels. Numb, you suppose. But not. Dreamlike, but not, because you’re awake and you know you’re awake and each hand has five fingers but somehow those hands just feel… _distant_. Further away than they should, as if the everything and nothing in your head is like dental plaque coating your cerebrum, getting into all the folds and making it harder for every neuron to get to where it needs to get to: muffling your conscious connection to your central nervous system. So everything feels further away. Not necessarily _less_ , just… disconnected. But not.

Describing things fucking sucks.

Maybe it’s your eyes that are fucked. In any case, pain is still a thing—there’s a sharp, stabbing pain on the right side of your ribcage for no apparent reason and ordinarily maybe you’d have the mental faculty to be even a little concerned about it but that cerebral plaque must be really built up over the section of your brain that controls caring about things in any immediate way. Maybe a part of your brain (or your body, you once read about lucid dreaming and it implied that your mind and body “think” separately, whatever the fuck that means) knows that there’s some part of the system fucking itself over, that something’s wrong, and maybe that stabbing pain is a distress signal—SOS motherfucker, respond if you’re still alive.

Yeah. You’re alive. You don’t entirely feel it, but you are. That’s not really a comfort though—more of an annoying reality, because it means you have to deal with this… _feeling_. This I-don’t-want-to-do-anything feeling; this empty/not empty feeling.

Remember what fun was like? Kinda. You try and remember the last time you had fun.

You draw a blank on that one.

What was the last time you were excited?

 

…You’re not sure you’ve ever been excited in your life. It kinda goes against everything you were ever taught was right, and everything you were ever taught about how to be. Being excited about things isn’t cool—excitement is for dorks, dorks like John and Jade who you totally never envied for their innate abilities to get excited about _seemingly fucking anything_ and—

You sit up. Maybe you’ll go for a walk. Surely that’ll be at least a little bit interesting, and less fucking depressing than just lying here waiting for death or worse to claim you. (You’re not sure what worse would be, but a part of you can’t help but be morbidly curious about it. Another part of you posits that maybe _life_ is worse than death because life is experience and limitations and suffering and—)

You wonder if the labs on the meteors in The Veil in yours and Rose’s and John’s and Jade’s session were this expansive and confusing and high-ceilinged and cold and empty and plain old fucking creepy. You’re pretty sure you heard Vriska piping on about how she thinks the tunnels expand all the way through the inside of the meteor (because she’s a noisy bag of fucking wind—just like all trolls, it would appear) the last time you were in the common area. You’re not sure that’s true but you wouldn’t be entirely surprised.

You wander the halls of the lab with your empty/not-empty chest cavity, your heart doing its best impression of a threatened hedgehog, and your empty/not-empty head, so crowded but cloudy you begin to wonder if you might be coming down with a head cold or something. Your limbs and all the rest of your body still feel divided from your mind by a thick layer of cotton, but they still obey you so you suppose it’s not too much of an issue. You decide to head downwards. There’s some vague notion in a corner of your mind that you might get lost and your friends will never find you and you’ll starve, alone, hungry, cold, in some dark, unforgiving metal corridor. That would suck. The opposite corner silently says _go for it_. Because why the fuck not.

Maybe a little life-or-death is all you need to make this fog (that’s not the right way to describe it either) finally disperse and let you want to do things again. There are better ways to get into life-or-death situations than talking a fucking _walk_ , though.

That stabbing pain in your side won’t go away. In fact it’s only gotten worse since you started walking. It’s still not that bad, just annoying, so you continue to ignore it.

 

You’re not sure how long you’ve been walking. There’s something soothingly monotonous about walking around aimlessly, going further down, down, down into the heart of the lab—the heart of the meteor itself, perhaps. Walking is just _one, two. One, two. One, two. One, two._

_Left, right. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right._

A little like sword fighting, then. Maybe. Most opponents, when they get blocked from the left, will come at you again from the right. In a fist fight, even if you don’t get blocked, it’s a pretty sure-fire way to fuck someone up in a jiffy: hit ‘em quick with a couple left hooks then finish them off with a right-side undercut.

It’s the element of surprise that makes it work so well. That’s where being left handed was always useful. Using scissors? Fuck that. In combat, though? Got ‘em. Unless you’re against another leftie, of course.

The pain in your side flares up into something noteworthy and without intending to, you gasp and physically jolt, your hand coming up to the spot.

Alright. That was definitely weird. It’s just your body/brain conspiring against you, though, so there’s nothing you can do about it.

You’re starting to get a headache. You look around.

Okay, you were pretty sure you were heading downwards but you must have zoned out at some point because you know _exactly_ where you are and it’s not at the centre of the fucking meteor. Jesus H. Christ on a meteor blasting off into fuck knows where, you must have walked in a giant vertical loop. Though you can’t recall going up any stairs. Maybe the lab itself is alive and rerouting you when you aren’t paying attention, like Daedalus’ fucking Labyrinth or something. Maybe you’ll encounter a minotaur. That would be exciting, maybe.

There’s no minotaur at the end of this corridor though.

You sigh and put one foot in front of the other again, your headache growing as the pain in your side diminishes.

You reach the end of the corridor, and the door at the end of the corridor, and you don’t even knock. You don’t do that anymore—and you know you don’t need to. You hit the button and it slides open.

Predictably, Karkat is sitting in almost complete darkness other than the light from his husktop, casting him in eerie, blue-white illumination. He’s the only visible thing in the room, like the literal fucking light at the end of the dark tunnel (corridor).

He glances up from his screen and throws you a brief smile. He doesn’t say anything. He turns back to his husktop and continues typing. It’s fine—you’re not sure you want him to say anything. You’re damn sure _you_ don’t want to say anything. Neither of you _need_ to say anything.

It’s cheesy as fuck, and for a brief moment you hate yourself a little for it, but even just seeing him is comforting—though you’re still not sure what it is you even need comforting about.

You try not to care. You go over and curl up next to him, resting your forehead right where his neck joins his shoulder. Your nose brushes his clavicle (or whatever the troll equivalent of a clavicle is) through his shirt. Your shades press into your face a little.

He stops typing for a moment, tucking your head under his jaw as one hand comes up to comb through your hair. Good thing, because _you_ haven’t combed it in like three days.

“You okay?”

You don’t answer. He pats your hair. He goes back to typing. You think maybe your heart unclenches a little bit. Your headache doesn’t feel so bad.

 

Later, when your head rests in his lap and your shades are put aside and his hand rests in your hair and some rom-com you’re barely paying attention to plays on his husktop, you realise that, all along, you knew exactly what you wanted to do.

And maybe it doesn’t fix anything—maybe it doesn’t fix _you_ —but that’s fine.

Maybe moments like these are all you really want out of life.

 

But _fuck_ if that doesn’t sound corny as shit.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah I pretty much worked on this tonight instead of on [NRNL](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7212487/chapters/16366483) like I probably should have, but I feel like this was really something I needed to get out of my head. Also it was nice to just _write_ without having to worry about a gazillion plot threads for once. I guess I've just had enough of convolution this week.
> 
>  
> 
> Basically, I hope you liked it, or were able to derive something from it, or... something to that effect.


End file.
